A Cloud of Dust

A number of readers, including this one, had a problem with E. L. Doctorow’s best-known and best-selling novel, “Ragtime” (1975). Brilliantly written in a ricky-ticky ragtime prose, the book not only mingled the American celebrities of 1902 (Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan) with the typical and the obscure (the narrator’s upper-middle-class New Rochelle family, the tenement-dwelling Jewish artist Tateh and his daughter) but had the historical figures do things and achieve conjunctions that never transpired—the rich killer Harry Thaw stripping naked and banging his penis between the bars of his cell at the Tombs while Houdini watches, radical Emma Goldman relieving scandalous Evelyn Nesbit of her corset and giving her a loving oil massage. It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game. Doctorow is a stranger writer than he at first seems; his fiction, though generous with the conventional pleasures of dramatic plot, colorful characters, and information-rich prose, yet challenges the reader with a puckish truculence. His novels and short stories generally seek the shelter of a bygone period in which to take root; when they are set in the present, like “City of God” (2000), an imp of modernist experimentation and fantasy goes wild. Even his tenderest, most autobiographical, and least souped-up work, “The World’s Fair” (1985), builds to a climactic scene in which naked women underwater are molested by Oscar the Amorous Octopus. His recent collection, “Sweet Land Stories” (2004), held five stories—four of them published in this magazine—that, like his novella “The Waterworks” (1994) and the prize-winning novel “Billy Bathgate” (1989), tingle with their injections of the murderous and the macabre.

His splendid new novel, “The March” (Random House; $29.95), pretty well cures my Doctorow problem. A many-faceted recounting of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous, and in some quarters still infamous, march of sixty-two thousand Union soldiers, in 1864-65, through Georgia and then the Carolinas, it combines the author’s saturnine strengths with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy. The novel shares with “Ragtime” a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud and up close, and finally receding over the horizon. Reading historical fiction, we often itch, our curiosity piqued, to consult a book of straight history, to get to the facts without the fiction. But “The March” stimulates little such itch; it offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only fiction could provide. Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry. At the novel’s outset, black slaves in Georgia see a brown tint in the sky, “as if the world was turned upside down”:

**{: .break one} ** And, as they watched, the brown cloud took on a reddish cast. It moved forward, thin as a hatchet blade in front and then widening like the furrow from the plow. . . . When the sound of this cloud reached them, it was like nothing they had ever heard in their lives. It was not fearsomely heaven-made, like thunder or lightning or howling wind, but something felt through their feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming. Then, carried on a gust of wind, the sound became for moments a rhythmic tromp that relieved them as the human reason for the great cloud of dust. **

Sherman’s march is conjured up as a human entity as large as the weather, a “floating world” that destroys as it goes and carries along some living fragments. It is a revolution in motion—“On the march is the new way to live. . . . The world was remade, everything become something else”—bringing in its wake a crowd of freed slaves that reaches many thousands in number. It picks up a pair of Confederate soldiers, Will Kirkland and Arly Wilcox, who were waiting in prison to be executed, respectively, for desertion and for sleeping on picket duty, and who, released to fight in a battle, change into Union uniforms and are in turn captured by the Confederates and, in the fog of war, let loose again. Two respectable Southern women, Mattie Jameson and Emily Thompson, their homes invaded and abandoned, join the march and find employment and protection on the staff of an Army surgeon, Colonel Wrede Sartorius, a German-born “neatly put-together man who seemed inviolate in the carnage around him,” and whom Doctorow readers have previously met as the embodiment of cold-blooded science in “The Waterworks.” Among the black followers of the march are Emily’s housemaid Wilma Jones, who is saved from drowning by a handsome banjo-playing enlistee in the Negro construction-working “pioneers”; his name is Coalhouse Walker, and he will be the father of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., the noblest figure in “Ragtime.”

Mattie Jameson’s husband, John, has fathered a child by a female slave, and the child, called Pearl, looks white, and passes for a time as a Union drummer boy. She acquires literacy and nursing skills on the march, plus the love of an Irish-American New Yorker, Stephen Walsh, who of all this horde of characters seems closest to Doctorow’s own point of view—an illusionless skeptic, yet capable of courage and love. Walsh and Pearl head into the future, but part of their future’s relative brightness rests on her apparent whiteness, a moral conundrum that afflicts her with a grave case of that twentieth-century complaint, liberal guilt. Her name borrowed from the elfin child in Hawthorne’s masterpiece, her presence dusted with the magic realism of a Toni Morrison novel, Pearl is hard to picture, though we are assured that she becomes beautiful. She also becomes almost superhuman; in the aftermath of a battle, she reunites Mattie, by now a widow, with her only surviving son, while briskly lecturing both of them on their past sins under the slave system.

Pearl is the most sympathetic character in “The March,” the one we root for, but her ability to do everything right opens the author to the charge of sentimentality, to which white writers on the evils of slavery are understandably prone. There is not an unkind or unwise black character in the book. One old plantation owner is allowed a speech, harsh with self-righteous paternalism, of some eloquence, but John Jameson personifies the slave system’s inhuman brutality: as the march approaches, he sells off a dozen field hands with the vow “No buck nigger of mine will wear a Federal uniform, I’ll promise you that,” and he turns out the docile and elderly Roscoe with the explanation that he’d “got the best out of Roscoe and what was left wasn’t worth providing for.” Doctorow offers, through the mind of Stephen Walsh, a dystopian vision of a South where the institution was perpetuated indefinitely:

**{: .break one} ** In this strange country down here, after generations of its hideous ways, slaves were no longer simply black, they were degrees of white. Yes, he thought, if the South were to prevail, theoretically there could be a time when whiteness alone would not guarantee the identity of a free man. Anyone might be indentured and shackled and sold on an auction block, the color black having been a temporary expedient, the idea of a slave class itself being the underlying premise. **

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The march also collects, to round out this partial roll call, a black child, David, who flees the plantation mansion to attach himself to an English journalist and reluctant foster father, Hugh Pryce; and a black photographer, Calvin Harper, who is partially blinded in saving General Sherman’s life, a deed for which he receives no thanks and is nearly executed. Sherman himself, the directing brain behind the great plow-shaped cloud of dust, makes an unprepossessing first appearance, on a horse too small for him, “so that his feet practically touched the ground. He was not at all military-looking, with his tunic covered with dust and half unbuttoned, and a handkerchief tied at his neck, an old beaten-up cap, and a cigar stub in his mouth, and a red beard with streaks of gray.” Doctorow’s leftish anti-establishmentarianism does not, as “The March” moves from the realm of freed slaves and disenfranchised women up into the councils of the powerful, indict the leaders of the Union. Sherman is portrayed as an insomniac brandytippler with an odd fondness for a soldier’s spartan life, but his fire of purpose and his strategic intelligence are admired as heroic. He sheds a deflected paternal love on little Pearl when she is masquerading as a drummer boy, gallantly receives his enemy General Joe Johnston as a fellow-member of the West Point aristocracy, and shows a theatrical literary streak that is endearing. He is openly emotional, telling Pearl, “Sometimes I want to cry, too.” As the novel approaches its end, and its fiction becomes more historical and less visionary, Sherman and Grant and Lincoln have a shipboard conference on the James River. The effect is as gentle as a salted-paper print, and the conversations are scarcely more than a murmur. Seen through the eyes of Wrede Sartorius, who is present, Grant is “rather short, stocky, brown beard of a thick texture, a quiet man clearly not interested in making any kind of impression, unlike Sherman, who didn’t seem to be able to stop talking,” and Lincoln is “someone eaten away by life, with eyes pained and a physiognomy almost sepulchral.” The doctor professionally observes that “Grant’s color was good, and his eyes only slightly bloodshot,’’ and Lincoln, who wears a shawl and “the weak, hopeful smile of the sick,” may have “some sort of hereditary condition, a syndrome of overdeveloped extremities and rude features.” It measures the book’s largeness of sympathy that, unsparingly and repetitively as it details the carnage of the Civil War—“war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal or moral principle”; a “monumentality of human disaster’’—it spares respect and even affection for those whose decisions propel the ordeal onward. An especially poignant glimpse of leadership in action comes early in the book, and involves “boys from the Georgia Military Institute who had been given the honor of bearing the brunt of an attack”:

**{: .break one} ** Over on the other side the terrain was less swampy, and in the mossy glades Milledgeville cadets lay dead or wounded behind their logs and mounds of earth. Boys without a scratch on them wandered in a daze. Some were crying. Cadet officers went among them, pushing them back to their positions, slapping them, to make them obey. **

Doctorow, at ease in the nineteenth century, demonstrates an impressive familiarity with military logistics and tactics prior to fully mechanized warfare, including the grim fate of horses, who not only suffer battle wounds but are slain by the armies to make way for newer ones. Arly explains, “An army works its animals near to death so on a re’glar basis it rids itself of its consumed-up animals.” The smell of their many bloated corpses on the banks of the Cape Fear River in Fayetteville is terrible. The floating world of the march, with its sixty thousand unbathing men and all their excrement, can be smelled at a distance. Emily, setting out to become a camp follower, “knew the direction the armies had taken. You just followed the roads that were beaten down, and before long you would hear a sound not natural to the countryside. And then you would smell them.” Medical procedures of the time are rendered with special, well-researched fidelity, and they include not only the lightning-fast amputations of the field tent but a delicate, truly clinical detail unique in my reading of sex scenes: virgin Emily about to give herself, after long infatuation, to Wrede Sartorius, “heard him open his instrument case. To spare you pain, he said, standing above her, I will do this small procedure. You will feel only a slight sting. And she felt his fingers dilating her, and then it was just as he said, and there was no blood to speak of.”

The writing, solid and speedy in the modern manner, is subtly tinged with older usages. Sherman reflects upon “our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons.” Grant observes that the President “can only wait on our news, sitting in Washington without the hell-may-care that comes from a good battle.” One battle carries into “the declivitous patch in sight of the plantation house.” Birds sing “softer, twittier songs, like the birds knew full well what a fearful war was around them.” Asked by Arly, “Are you for religion, young Will?,” Will answers, as naturally as you please, “I never did countenance it.” Victorian fancywork inflects the narrative voice: “The city of Fayetteville was of a dark blue aspect, as if the abstract color had found an organic vestiture for itself.” The voice of the black South, which comes on heavy in Pearl’s early appearances (“Nobody doan never have touch Porhl! When I little, de brudder try. Oh yeah. I raise up dis bony knee hard in his what he got dere, and dat were dat and nobody since!”), is lightly caught in such a piece of dialogue as Wilma’s saying, “Judge Thompson’s who I was bound to.” Arly, who turns out to be demented as well as highly verbal, sports the rhetoric of the white South as he expostulates to innocent Will on the joys of copulation:

**{: .break one} ** “And when we go inside them, plum into their beings, and they cry out in our ear and we feel there is nothing softer, warmer, or more honeyed up in God’s world than what embraces our stiff tool, and we are made by God to shiver into them the issue of our loins, well, boy, don’t talk to me about what you don’t know.” **

Poetry enters prose in such a simple surreal touch as Emily noticing, of her dead father’s face, “With the eyes closed, the nose seemed to grow,” and in such a simple description of physical desolation as “She had turned into the spacious yards of a manse that had seen some fire. The front was scorched, the roof shingles half torn away, and tree vines out front hanging black and limp like dead snakes.” “The March” carries us through a multitude of moments of wonder and pity, terror and comedy, to the triumph of Southern surrender and the sudden tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination. Sherman’s march is large enough, American myth enough, to pull even a laggard recruit along, and to hold Doctorow’s busy imagination fast to the reality of history even as he refreshes our memory of it. ♦